Do Punishments Really Work?

His six-year-old son insists that he wants to play soccer in the living room of his house, with the latent possibility of destroying vases and windows; then you stand firm, and with your face as serious as your facial musculature allows, you threaten to punish him.

The next day, her little offspring from hell refuses to do homework, and you again threaten to punish him. Later, he seems determined to annoy his younger sister, and you, what a novelty, threaten to punish him.

All of these cases, of course, are fictitious, but they well represent the discipline methodology that many parents use. But, Are punishments really effective? The answer depends on what you intend to accomplish with your child.

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Does punishing work?

If what you are looking for is to comply with an order immediately, most likely the strategy will be successful. But in that case, your child will be agreeing to what you ask out of fear, out of fear of punishment; not because I respect him as a parent or because he believes that doing so is the right thing to do.

Implicitly, you will be teaching the child that problems are solved through the threat or exercise of power. And the best way to get people to do things is by putting fear under their skin.

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Jonathan Freedman's experiment

An astute psychologist named Jonathan Freedman conducted an interesting experiment that illustrates the point above. He went to a school where he took a group of children and took them, one by one, to a special room where there were several cheap toys and ruffles, among which stood out a fantastic robot full of lights and gadgets that was controlled remote. In this context, he would tell the boy that he had to leave the room for a few minutes, and that in the meantime, he could play with any of the toys, except the robot.

"If you get to touch the robot, then I will find out and I will get very, very angry", he said with the best ogre face of him. Immediately afterwards, he would leave the room and observe what the boy was doing through a mirrored glass. Obviously, almost all the children who went through the experiment tried hard to control their impulses and avoided getting close to the robot.

In the second condition of the same experiment, Freedman simply told the children, that while he was absent for a few moments, they could entertain themselves by playing, but that "it was not right for them to play with the robot." In this case, he did not resort to threats of any kind, he simply assured them that it was not correct to touch the robot. On this occasion, as in the previous one, practically all the children avoided approaching the robot, and They settled for the other toys devoid of appeal.

The effect of the absence of authority

But what is interesting is what happened just over a month later. Freedman sent a collaborator to the same school to repeat the same sequence with the same children, both from one group and the other. Only this time, when the woman had to leave the room, she said absolutely nothing to the children. In other words, they were free to do whatever they wanted.

What happened turned out to be absolutely surprising and revealing. The boys in the first group, who a month earlier had avoided playing with the robot by conforming to an external command issued by a scowling adult, not being present now that adult and consequently the threat disappeared, they felt free to play with the forbidden toy.

On the contrary, the boys in the second group, even with Freadman not present, did exactly the same as the previous occasion, and stayed away from the flashy robot. In the absence of an external threat, in the first place, it seemed that they had developed their own internal arguments, which justified why they should not play with the robot.

Maybe so convinced it was their decision, and not someone else's arbitrary imposition, they felt inclined to act in a manner consistent with their beliefs. These children, free from external pressure, took responsibility for their own actions, probably feeling that they were the ones who voluntarily chose what they wanted to do.

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The importance of motivation

The moral is clear: both the punishments and the rewards constitute external motivations that do not generate a long-term commitment, disappearing the desired behavior as soon as the desired consequence disappears.

In everyday life, many times I have been able to observe with my own eyes, how some parents, worse still, punish their children forcing them to do homework or read a book, creating the false notion that these activities are in themselves bad, unpleasant and worth avoiding. In return, they reward them with more hours of television and video games, reinforcing the idea that these activities are desirable and carry a great power of gratification.

Yes, dear readers. It is common in these times, that our children grow up believing that reading is despicable and should be avoided at all costs, and watching television is the way to pleasure and personal success. If you are the parent of a small child, or plan to become one soon, I entrust you to do things accordingly: Educate him on the basis of a minimum set of moral criteria if you want him to eventually become an adult of well. It doesn't take more than that. Don't teach him to obey just out of fear of punishment.

At some point, if you are lucky, you will become an old man. Don't complain if your historically bullied child has now become a spiteful adult, and decides to commit him to a seedy nursing home, or send him on vacation to Ethiopia in full summer.